How to overcome inaction

It’s funny to me that as I sat down to write this piece about inaction, I spent minutes on end staring at the blinking cursor on my blank page. It’s not that I have nothing to say, it’s that I have too much to say. This topic sits at the very core of me, driving the most powerful narratives in my life. It’s caused me the most distress, and created the most joy. It’s complicated. The prospect of sitting here and wrangling such a nuanced subject in my life is daunting, so my goal is to keep it simple.

I’d presume that from the outside I seem like a highly actionable person. I do a lot of “doing” — building business concepts, trying new things, etc. Those who work with me know that I am quite the grafter, as my British friends say. I enjoy having a big idea brain, and I rarely hold back. What I mean by that is I choose to live without regret in many ways. If an idea grips me and fills me with excitement, I will try it. I can understand how this appears to others, but it is a partial truth. This is something I learned very recently.

In the past five or so years, I’ve been in a continuous battle with the question: why haven’t I lived up to my potential? Simultaneous knowing of what I’m capable of and the fact that I am not there yet.

I mean it genuinely when I say I’ve done more healing and self development than many will do in a lifetime. My therapist and I are nearing our six year anniversary. He has not been shy about letting me know just how far I have come in that time, as a person but also in building my life. In spirituality, this is often referred to as “shadow work” — diving deep into your consciousness to surface what is and isn’t serving you. I’m not going to get into the work that these years have required of me. That is a story for another time.

I arrived at this year feeling nearly complete, like the work had been finished. If you’ve gone through this extent of healing and self discovery, you’ll understand the impact. Each lesson, perspective change, or release removes weight from your shoulders. It’s a feeling of freedom.

But the question still lingered: why haven’t I lived up to my potential?

I thought I had been doing all of the right things, but this question sat in my chest. It started to feel like, to an extent, the question in itself had become the barrier. So, I started digging further, dissecting my daily behaviors and mindsets. I walked myself through my adult life, looking for a common denominator — was there something underlying that caused things to fall short?

My thoughts centered around action and realized it wasn’t that my businesses or projects were falling short, it’s that I was. There was an invisible barrier keeping me from truly going for it. I wasn’t seeing things through, and I definitely wasn’t allowing myself to see what I’m capable of.

When I brought this up with my therapist, he asked a series of questions, starting with: what holds me back from taking action?

Yes, I’ll try things, I’ll build things. But with each and every one, I stop right after it becomes real. I “lose passion” or “decide to pivot.” Why was this? Was it fear of failure? Fear of being visible? Lack of trust in myself?

No. It was a need to control.

By halting, I was controlling the outcome. Every. Single. Time. It felt safe, knowing what would happen. It gave me a scapegoat — my own disinterest. The business didn’t fail, I just moved on. The project didn’t fall apart, I just changed my mind. I would write things off as passion projects, saying they’re just for fun.

This self sabotage was my way of protecting myself from the unknown. No one could tell me no if I said it to myself first. This controlled failure was easier to digest than letting myself go all in, not knowing what would come of it.

But, the purpose of this piece is not to dissect this into oblivion — I’ll have much more to say about it in the future. The purpose of this is to explain how to move forward. How can you get yourself to take consistent, impactful, and aligned action in your life?

Get real with yourself.

You need to do an honest assessment of your actions, of lack thereof. This, in my opinion, is the hardest part. It forces you to deconstruct narratives that you may not know are dictating your behavior. For me, this was the narrative that I had been doing all that I could to pursue my goals, but nothing was working. I had to embrace the fact that I had not actually been doing all that I could — I was self limiting.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Are the actions I’m taking on a daily basis aligned with my goals? Are they based on old versions of myself and/or my life?

• Is the version of myself that lives in my head showing up in reality? Ex) You think a lot about how much you care about writing, but never actually write.

• Are there actions that I know are necessary, but I continue to avoid?

Make it real.

Those dreams, goals, and interests that live in your head? They need to be laid out and built into a blueprint. When these things only live in theory, they can be glamorized but also become overwhelming — a goal so large that you don’t understand how to take the first step.

I found myself at a loss, not knowing where to begin. I couldn’t understand how I could be so on it and actionable in work for others (clients or otherwise), but when it came to my own projects my feet were cemented. I realized that the other work has systems and set structures that I am very comfortable with. I know where to start and what comes next. In my own work, there is no blueprint. There is no next step unless I set it myself. In my daily life, this means having tasks and project plans in Trello and a daily to do list in my notebook. It means taking something in my imagination and making it a tangible reality.

Tether yourself to action, not identity.

I am all for claiming who you are/want to be. However, identity can come with pressure.

I’ve found that when I’m tethered to identity, I tend to overthink. I’ll get all in the weeds with it without actually doing the action required for the identity, like the friend who will talk in circles about how much they want to be a writer but won’t engage in the act of writing. The pressure of the identity and getting it “right” can cause inaction through paralysis.

Instead, focus on building the identity through the action.

Act first, optimize later.

Let’s dig further into how focusing on getting it “right” can cause inaction through paralysis.

We live in a world that is obsessed with optimization. Here’s a better way to do this, here’s a faster way to do that. Social media is full of content claiming to provide the only correct way to do something. It’s easy to get stuck in this.

I started posting videos on YouTube in 2024 with the goal of building an engaged audience. But I continually fail to be consistent. Not because I don’t want to do it, but because I keep focusing on getting it right. I try to optimize it without providing any output to optimize. In my work, this is like a client wanting to optimize their ads strategy without ever running ads. We have no data — how do we know what works?

Getting it right will come. First, you have to do it.